Eddie Lindimore treasures his memories of mining.
At his home in McConnelsville, the nearly 90-year old sorts through newspaper clippings that are strewn amidst scraps of maps and manuals.
“Here's the inside of the machine. That's me standing there,” Lindimore said, pride in his eyes as he picked up a black and white photo of a man in a hard hat in a room of machinery.
For much of the 20th century, Ohio was a powerhouse of coal production. Today, many of the once thriving coal towns and mines have been abandoned, leaving remnants of a bygone industry.
In southeast Ohio, one Goliath industry relic, affectionately dubbed “Big Muskie,” is being recognized with a new historical marker.
‘Larger than life’
After World War II, energy demand soared and, in 1969, the Central Ohio Coal Company got a massive machine to meet it. Lindimore was the first supervisor on what would become the world’s largest walking dragline excavator, a towering piece of equipment that looks like a cross between a tank and a crane.
Despite bearing no resemblance to the fish, the engineering marvel became known to southeast Ohio and beyond as “Big Muskie.”
“This was a thing that was larger than life in every way,” said Neil Humphrey, historical resource program administrator with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “During its life, it was the biggest moving object on Earth.”
Clouds of dust would form as the nearly 22-story tall machine changed the landscape of southeast Ohio in a single scoop. Every day, it picked up to 325 tons of dirt and coal, or about the weight of a Boeing 747.
“It's insane how large it was… it's estimated to have unearthed twice the amount of earth moved in the construction of the Panama Canal,” Humphrey said.
Big Muskie’s size is symbolic of just how big Ohio’s contributions were to the country’s coal production. Lindimore said the machine was a near-constant fixture in southeast Ohio.
“It worked every day when it wasn't broken down,” he said. “Now, it broke down a lot, but it worked every day, seven days a week, except Christmas. That's the only time it shut down.”
Preserving the legacy
Then, the ground shifted. Amendments to the Clean Air Act raised the bar for air quality, making high sulfur coal harder to sell. Big Muskie shut down in 1991.
“No one knew quite what to do with it. Some people wanted to turn it into a museum. And people want to take parts of it or put it somewhere,” Humphrey said.
Ultimately, in 1999, Big Muskie was dismantled and sold for scrap. But, at Miners Memorial Park, one part is preserved.
On a sunny summer day, Lindimore grinned as he walked up to a bucket big enough to hold an entire marching band.
“That's where the pictures come from,” he said, pointing at the hunk of metal and laughing with delight.
What once hollowed out hillsides, now sits still for selfies with tourists. Martha Bradley Maxwell came all the way from Texas to visit Big Muskie. She said she wanted to pay her respects to her cousin, Charles Mitchell, who was just 26 when he lost his life working on Big Muskie.
“Last year was the first year that I saw it, and I just couldn't believe it. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, he was working on that thing?’” Maxwell said, staring up at the bucket.
Now with a historical marker telling Big Muskie’s story, historian Humphrey hopes more people will see the artifact like Maxwell does: not just a big bucket, but a monument to Ohio’s coal legacy.
It deserves remembering, he said, because Big Muskie shaped both the land and the lives of the people who worked on it.
“Without somebody caring about something, these things disappear. Even something like this massive machine, this is the only part left of it: what else can disappear from history if this can go away?”
